Osprey Island (7 page)

Sheriff Harty approached Roddy’s truck. Roddy and Squee climbed out slowly, as if to forestall what was about to happen. Mia was still asleep against Suzy. Squee had Roddy’s hand, was pressed as close to the side of Roddy’s leg as he could get, eyes big and glassy and cold. Sheriff Harty nodded solemnly to Roddy, then squatted down to Squee’s level.

“Squee,” the sheriff said, and then he paused, not knowing how to proceed. He took a breath, tried again.

Squee spoke first, his voice controlled. “My mom was in there,” he said.

Sheriff Harty let out his breath, nodding slowly. He kept looking right at Squee, right in the eye, as if he needed to see if the boy really understood. Squee said nothing more, but his throat and jaw jerked as if he was biting down on the inside of his cheek. Sheriff Harty looked up from Squee to Roddy, planted his hands on his thighs to push himself up. “You OK?” he said to Roddy as he straightened himself, glancing at Squee—
Can you stay with him? Take care of the
boy for right now?
—and Roddy nodded.

“She’s gone,” the sheriff said, and then his voice caught, as if he was gagging but knew he had to say it. It was his job to say it. “She wouldn’t of felt any pain . . .”

Squee kept nodding, his fingernails digging so hard into the flesh of Roddy’s palm he’d find cuts later, like tooth marks.

The sheriff turned to go, left Roddy and Squee there, and Suzy leaned from the truck window behind him and spoke his name. “We should go tell your mother,” she said.

Roddy lifted Squee from the ground onto his hip. The boy’s body was so rigid and light it was like lifting the hollow skeleton of a bird. He put Squee into the cab, then climbed in himself and started the engine.

Eden Jacobs was a stolid, elusive woman who had taken her own husband’s death and her son’s homecoming the way she took her morning herbs: pennyroyal, sip, swallow; dong quai, sip, swallow; valerian, licorice, skullcap, black cohosh, toss back the head and wash it all down. And, sure, the other Islanders thought it odd that such human dramas should evoke so little response in their own subject, but everyone had known that Eden Jacobs was an odd woman the minute she stepped off the ferry thirty-eight years before, one hand holding a small suitcase, the other enveloped by Roderick Jacobs’s massive paw.

Roddy put the truck in park in Eden’s driveway but left it running as he went and knocked on the front door like a traveling solicitor. He stood and spoke to his mother from the stoop, turning back to gesture to Squee, Suzy, and Mia in the truck. Eden took the news stoically. Pesticide use on the roadsides, and she mounted an immediate offensive. Death of a woman she’d known since that woman was a baby, and Eden said, “Well, why don’t you all come in? I’ll make some breakfast. The children must be hungry.” Roddy nodded, though he wouldn’t likely eat inside himself, and went back to the truck to get Suzy and the kids, who filed across the yard and up the front steps like zombies. Roddy held the door for them. When the others were inside, Eden stood in the doorway. She faced her son. “So this is how it happens in the end.”

He pursed his lips, nodding, and followed his mother reluctantly inside.

Eden Jacobs’s living room was a tidy clutter of doilied end tables and framed photographs. On the coffee table were a covered glass dish of raw sunflower seeds and a floral saucer filled with cellophane-wrapped sesame candies. There was an old electric organ in one corner that Roderick Senior had inherited from his own mother, which hadn’t been played in thirty years. On the far wall, near the bedroom hallway, stood Roderick’s gun case, his old hunting rifles racked inside like good china stored away for special occasions against a lining of bronze-colored velveteen. Neither the window curtains nor the baseboards were dusty. Eden Jacobs had been keeping house here for almost forty years.

“Come, I’ll put up some coffee,” Eden said, and she led Suzy to the kitchen. Suzy glanced back to the kids, who had climbed onto the couch, too stunned and dazed to do anything but sit quietly.

Roddy hovered awkwardly, reluctant to sit down. Eden poured apple juice into two small glasses and carried them to the living room.

“Thank you,” said Mia, her voice small.

“Thank you,” Squee echoed. His voice was strange as well, unnatural, as though grief had made him, both of them, polite and quiet and scared. Mia held her juice without drinking it. Squee gulped his down in four swallows, without breathing, handed the cup back to Eden, and then turned and vomited into the leaves of the potted spider plant beside the couch. “I’m sorry,” he choked out.

“Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart,” Eden said. She handed the boy a color-printed cocktail napkin—a squirrel nibbling acorns—and Squee wiped his mouth. Mia watched, terrified.

“Do you feel better?” Eden asked Squee.

Squee said, “I don’t know,” and Eden asked if he’d like to use the bathroom. The boy nodded.

“Through the bedroom there, on the left,” she directed. “Just do your best to ignore all the old lady stuff. The basic appliances are the same as you’ll find anywhere.”

Squee nodded again and walked toward Eden’s bedroom door.

Eden set the empty glass on the coffee table, bent down, and hefted up the plastic-potted spider plant. “We’ll just put you out for some sunshine, huh?” she said into the spindly green leaves. She opened the front door and set the plant down on the stoop as if it were a cat put out for the night. “There you go.”

Eden made the coffee and whisked up eggs with milk and cinnamon and vanilla extract and set it to soaking with a few slices of a bread she’d baked the week before, which was going stale. Suzy had gone to use the restroom and came back reporting that Squee was asleep on Eden’s bed, his sneakers dangling off the end as if he’d known well enough not to dirty up the bedsheets. Roddy excused himself now that Squee was asleep, retreating from the house that so clearly discomforted him and fleeing for his shed out back. Mia then promptly fell asleep on the couch, the apple juice glass still clutched in her hands, a splotch of it spilled across the belly of her T-shirt. Suzy extracted the glass from her daughter’s grip and set it in the sink. She managed to remove the shirt from Mia’s body and rinse it out in the bathroom without rousing the girl, who slept beneath a quilt Suzy drew over her.

Suzy choked down a few bites of French toast before Eden said, “Baby, if your stomach doesn’t want it, don’t force.” Suzy sighed gratefully. She sipped at her coffee and pushed the plate of food away. “Should I bring something out to Roddy?” she asked.

“Why don’t you.” Eden was already preparing a plate. “I do wish he’d talk more,” she said, as though she were picking up a conversational thread that had been dangling between the two of them for years. “I worry he keeps it all bottled too close.” Eden handed the plate to Suzy. She said, “I’m going to buzz down the hill, see if Art and Penny need anything.” They were both quiet a minute, Roddy’s French toast steaming the air between them. Eden closed her eyes. “God, to lose a child . . .” She shook her head, then snapped back to. “I don’t know how your mother lived through it, Suzanne.” She looked at Suzy with disarming frankness. “I never liked your mother particularly, but my heart went out to her. To lose a child, I can think of no more terrible a thing. Art and Penny . . . not that they’ve been much as parents for the last twenty-odd years, but still . . .” She left off. “I’ll just go see if there’s something they need.”

Suzy took the plate of French toast and went out back toward Roddy’s cabin. It was a good fifty yards behind the house, tucked into some oaks perched just before the hill dipped down into a ravine. She passed the picnic table where she’d done shots of something awful on a night twenty years before, which she didn’t much like to think about. Three cement blocks served as a stoop to Roddy’s shack, and Suzy stood atop them, knocking tentatively, as though she might catch him at something she’d rather not see.

He came to the door, opened it, and stood waiting for her to say something.

She thrust the plate toward him. “Here,” she said, “your mom . . .”

“Thanks.” He took the toast. “Do you want some coffee?” He gestured to the pot warming on a hot plate on an overturned crate beside the bed.

“I think I want some
whiskey,
” she said.

He reached for a bottle on the shelf above the hot plate.

“No, no, no, I think I’m . . . shit, maybe I do.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Jesus.” She was standing in his one-room house, holding her hair back out of her eyes, slumped like she wanted to crumble to the floor.

Roddy pointed to a chair beside the door. “Why don’t you sit down?” he said. “Why don’t you have some coffee?”

She sat, as directed. She held her head in her hands, eyes closed tightly behind her palms.

Roddy poured coffee from its tin kettle into a small blue plastic mug and held it out to Suzy, but her head was still down and she didn’t see. He stood there, arm outstretched, unnoticed.

“I don’t have milk,” he apologized.

“I couldn’t care less,” she said. She was about to cry for the first time since she’d been awakened by the hollering and commotion outside the laundry shack.

“You should get some sleep,” Roddy said.

Suzy laughed with resignation and resentment. “I feel insane,” she said. “I feel like I am losing my mind. I feel like I want to take Mia and walk down to the ferry and take the first one across and get on a bus and go home and pretend I was never here.”

“Yeah,” Roddy said. “I know.”

“I feel insane,” she repeated, as if maybe he hadn’t believed her the first time.

“I know,” he said again. His desperation was quiet. He looked around the room, his eyes searching frantically, his body moving barely at all. “Do you want to lie down?” He made a gesture toward the camp cot. “Maybe you’d feel better . . .”

“I don’t think I
want
to feel better,” she cut him off. “I think I want to feel
worse,
like I want to make it so bad that it breaks . . . that it breaks
me
or something and then I don’t have to be responsible for what I do or say or don’t. Or taking care of Mia or anyone else. Doc Zobeck could just shoot me full of something that’d make all the decisions for me. Jesus. I just want someone to knock me out.” Suzy stood suddenly. She looked as if she wanted to pace, but there was no room for it in the little cabin and her momentum stalled once she was upright. It seemed briefly that she might topple. She glanced around, looked to Roddy, flapped her arms awkwardly, then wrapped them around herself as if to contain something, to hold herself back from some downward tumble. Roddy watched her, afraid for what she might do. She hugged herself tightly, her tears finally breaking. “What are we supposed to
do
?”

It wasn’t a choice Roddy made then, not something he could say he decided to do and then did. He just moved. Here was Suzy, breaking, and there he was, feet away, moving to her. She held herself tight and small, and he enveloped her, the way his father used to envelop his mother, by his sheer size. He held her, his chin nearly level with the top of her head, and when she looked up at him he kissed her tears, and her eyes, and her cheeks, and everywhere the tears touched, because it was the only thing he could possibly do.

Seven

IN THE SHADOW OF THY WINGS WILL I MAKE MY REFUGE

Lorna Marie Vaughn Squire died early Tuesday morning in a tragic
fire at the Osprey Lodge laundry. She was thirty-six years old. The
daughter of Arthur and Penelope Vaughn of Island Drive, Lorna was
a 1970 graduate of Island High. She had been the head housekeeper at
the Osprey Lodge since 1969 and was beloved by all. Lorna is survived by her husband, Lance Squire, 38, and a son, Lance Jr., 8. May
she rest in peace.

—Island Times

ART VAUGHN WAS INCONSOLABLE. He’d been holding off mourning the loss of his daughter for more than twenty years, keeping alive the hope that she’d return to him someday. Now there was nothing more to put between himself and the pain, between the fact of the world with Lorna and the fact of the world without her. There were no maybes, no more possibilities, no more roads that led his daughter back to him. She was just gone, and Art Vaughn sat on his living room sofa and cried as he should have cried on Lorna’s wedding day.

Art and Penny Vaughn had been unable to conceive. But they had adopted Lorna in infancy, and Osprey Island was the only home she ever knew. The Vaughns were cut and dried: they acted according to the dictates of the Church, ate ground beef, Kraft Singles, and Rice-a-Roni, and lived in an aluminum-sided ranch house, blue ducks and pink cows stenciled on the walls, wicker baskets of syrupy potpourri and stitched quilt samplers festooning every cranny. Lorna’s parents loved her as a streak down the center of their otherwise eventless lives. They distrusted Lance even before they knew him, had always looked down on Merle Squire and the disgraces that defined her. When Lorna met Lance she was not yet thirteen years old—a child!— and Lance’s mere existence seemed to grant Lorna all the permission she needed to break into the lawless limbo of adolescence.

On an autumn evening in 1965, Lance had arrived at the Vaughns’ nest of faux-country charm to pick up Lorna for their first official date. It was his first and last encounter with Lorna’s father.

Lance was formal and officious, standing militarily at ease beside a framed cross-stitch of the Lord’s Prayer and answering to the third degree that passed for small talk when it came to some chump from the high school wanting to get into the panties of Art Vaughn’s only daughter. Art knew you could never trust a boy. His only hope, as he saw it, was to instill enough fear in the young man’s heart so that even if Lorna was ready to put out (as he feared she would), the boy might develop a case of temporary impotence. Art didn’t know if he had that kind of power to frighten, but for the sake of his little girl’s virginity, he gave it all he had.

“You’re Merle’s boy,” Art said. It was not a question.

“Yes sir.” Lance nodded once.

“Your mother’s doing well.” The pause that followed Art’s statements were his only indication of inquisition.

“Hasn’t done herself in yet,” Lance said.

“Say what?”

Lance shook his head in self-effacement.

“No word from your sister,” Art said. But if there’d been news from Kiki, everyone on Osprey would have heard it within hours. Art knew that. He’d heard talk about the Squires. Rumors about Merle finding the girl in Lance’s bed. Others said it was Lance in hers. And maybe all those were exaggerations. Maybe nothing like that had ever happened at all. But rumors started somewhere, suggested something of the truth that spawned them.

“No one’s heard from Kiki since summer,” Lance said, his eyes narrow as paper cuts.

Art lifted his wrist and looked at his watch as if it could tell him just how long she’d been gone and when she might be expected to turn up. “She’ll come ’round,” Art told Lance.

“She might,” Lance said.

“What kind of prayer is that, son?”

“Not a prayer, Mr. Vaughn.” Lance paused. His tone shifted darkly. “And I’m nobody’s son except my mother’s, sir.”

Art Vaughn blanched.

“Unless,” Lance went on, his voice slow and controlled, “unless you
are
my father. Which would make you a real sonofabitch.”

Art drew in his breath. “I beg your pardon,” he hissed.

Lance laughed, low and mean. He still held his hands behind his back. His feet were spread in a stance so vulnerable it was menacing, a stance that said,
You threaten me so little I’d roll over on my back
and bare my belly, you prick.
“You don’t beg a thing from me, Mr. Vaughn. And I know you don’t give two shits for pardon, mine or anyone else’s.”

Art sucked in his gut. He reached for the front doorknob. “You better pray you’ve got the
Lord’s
pardon, boy. For
that
you better pray.” He opened the door, and Lance never set foot in the Vaughns’ house again.

Lorna, as a matter of course, was forbidden to see Lance Squire under penalty of every penalty that her parents (who were not creative people) could dream up. Perhaps equally predictable was how little these threats affected Lorna. She disobeyed every order laid upon her, and in the end it was more than clear who held the trump card in that family. What Lorna had on her parents was that they loved her a lot more—or at least in a qualitatively different way—than she loved them, and they forgave her every time, pulled her back into the fold, because they wanted her with them more than they wanted her justly punished. Lorna learned this lesson early: the less you cared, the more power you possessed. And it was maybe just that which kept her with Lance for so long. For everything you could say about Lance and Lorna—and there was certainly plenty to say—one true thing was that their love existed in a balance few people ever know. For everything they did wrong—and that was almost everything—there was something fundamentally right about the fact of them together.

In 1968 most of Lance’s high school buddies were breathlessly awaiting their eighteenth birthdays and the chance to go fight in Vietnam, but Lance, who’d had a childhood bout of measles that stole a good fraction of his hearing, didn’t go anywhere after graduation. He kept his job at Lovetsky’s car shop, rotating tires and patching flats, and Lorna stayed in school. She was no honors student, but she stuck it out, even after she got pregnant in the spring of her junior year and married that June in a big Island to-do held at the Lodge. The party was an uncharacteristically generous wedding present from Bud Chizek, although anyone would tell you he’d been acting strange—if understandably so—ever since Chas (his only son) had gotten killed in Vietnam six months before. But Bud didn’t only host Lance and Lorna’s wedding celebration—he invited the newlyweds to come live at the Lodge as heads of maintenance and housekeeping. Lance didn’t know why the tragedy of Chas’s death would prompt Bud to do such a thing, but he didn’t question a gift horse, at least not until he’d accepted the gift.

Art and Penny Vaughn were invited to the wedding out of cordiality, but they stayed home. That Lorna was pregnant surprised no one, least of all the Vaughns, who could have predicted it, despite higher hopes. And when Lorna lost the baby later that summer, it was no longer
necessary
that such a pretty seventeen-year-old girl be married to the island ne’er-do-well, but it was too late to take it all back. It was 1969, and Lance and Lorna were already well along on the path they’d follow to the end.

In the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, Penny was coping far better than her husband. She was eerily composed and ministering to Art when Eden knocked on their door that morning.

“Eden. Come in.” Penny stepped aside to let her pass.

“Oh, Penny,” Eden sighed, her tone meant to impart a world of sympathy. “Oh dear, no. I won’t bother you now. I only came to see if there’s anything you needed, anything I can do . . . Have you eaten? Can I bring you something? Something for Art?”

“Eden, you’re a dear. So thoughtful. I think we’re OK. Trying to stay busy, you know. Making up the guest room for Squee . . . Lord knows Lance can’t be caring for the boy now on his own.”

Eden nodded. “I have him at the house—Squee. He’s asleep—they were up all night. I guess we all were . . .”

Penny absently lifted her hand to her ear in the gesture of a telephone. “You just give a call when he wakes up and I’ll swing by for him . . .”

“Oh, I’ll run him down to you,” Eden cut in. She waved off toward her car. “Goodness, of course I’ll bring him down to you.” For the degree of emotion in their exchange, Penny and Eden might have been discussing carpooling to Wednesday-night bingo at the VFW. This was hardly unusual for Eden, well known for her disturbingly placid reactions to events that sent others careening. Penny Vaughn, on the other hand, was a woman who regularly wept during her weekday television “stories” and was known to carry a purse-pack of Kleenex for when she teared up during a particularly moving Sunday service. But there she was, at the dawn of the most dreaded tragedy of her life, puttering about like a chickadee. Penny Vaughn was perched at a very precarious place; whenever she finally fell, it seemed clear she would fall hard.

“You sure there’s nothing I can do . . . get . . . for you?” Eden asked again.

Penny shook her head primly. “Just my sweet grandson,” she clucked. This was odder still, in that Art and Penny had never spent much time with Squee at all, had never been particularly interested in Lance Squire’s progeny. Lorna and Lance had certainly spoken poorly enough of Lorna’s folks to color Squee’s opinion of his grandparents. Some Sundays Art and Penny asked to bring Squee with them to church, to which the Squires occasionally conceded, reluctantly. Art and Penny seemed less concerned for the actual
person
who was Squee than for the
soul
they believed to be housed therein, which they felt obliged to look out for. If they could have taken
that
to church with them and left the ragamuffin back at the Lodge, playing in the dirt outside his parents’ ill-kept home, they would quite surely have packed the Squee-specter into Penny’s pocketbook alongside the tissues and smuggled it into the service for some necessary deep-cleansing.

Eden took a detour by the Lodge on her way back home to stop in at the Squires’ cabin and pick up some things for Squee. She parked as close as she could get to the cottage and walked past the firemen and police still on the scene, past the charred remains of what had been the laundry shack.

“Hey, Eden,” the sheriff called out as she passed. As if it were any ordinary day.

She waved. “Just picking up some clothes for the boy,” she said. The sheriff waved her along.

Inside, in the room that had to be Squee’s, there was a chest of drawers, but everything seemed to have exploded out of it onto the floor. Eden would have collected some clothes in a pillowcase, but there didn’t even appear to be a pillow. The bed was covered in a stained mattress pad but nothing else. A Star Wars sleeping bag lay in a slump on the floor. She found a trash bag in the kitchen and threw in an assortment of T-shirts, shorts, underwear, and socks, all of which she’d have to wash when she got home.

On her way back up the hill, Eden passed Roddy in his truck. They paused, idling in the road, leaning out their windows to talk.

“I’m going to see what I can do down there,” Roddy said. “Find Bud . . . see . . .”

Eden nodded. “You’re a good boy, Roddy.”

Roddy closed his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, Ma,” he said, as though it pained him. “Oh, Ma.”

Back at Eden’s, Suzy and the children were half awake on the living room couch, blindly watching a television screen they could hardly see in the glaring midday sun. Mia was now wearing a T-shirt of Roddy’s that came down past her knees. Eden loaded Squee’s clothing into the washer, then busied herself baking a lentil loaf and an apple brown Betty for Penny and Art. She prepared peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and got Squee to eat a few bites, though he did so mechanically and seemingly without hunger. Squee was operating robotically, but his lack of animation almost seemed a blessing. He seemed dampened, his reactions to the world dulled. Against everything Eden believed, she allowed the kids to sit dumbly in front of the television all afternoon. Even Eden understood the necessity of mindlessness on some occasions.

When Suzy began to ready herself and Mia to return to the Lodge that evening, Squee wanted to go back with them. “Is Roddy there?” he asked. “I need to go help Roddy.” It was more vitality than he’d exhibited all day.

Suzy knelt down beside him. “Squee, babe,” she said, “you’re going to keep helping Roddy just like you have been, but what’ll help him the most right now is if you go and stay for a little bit with your Grandpa Art and Grandma Penny. They’ve got a room all ready for you, and they’re really going to need you with them now.” Suzy’s voice was teacherly and terrible.

Squee’s face was, for the first time that Suzy had seen, set in a child’s angry stubbornness. “I have to go to Grandma and Grandpa
Vaughn’s?
” he whined.

“Yeah, babe, for a little bit, you do . . .”

Squee looked weary and drained. He said, “Grandma and Grandpa Vaughn suck.”

It was all Suzy could do to keep from bursting into laughter. Her struggle seemed to please Squee, who brightened some. Suzy said, “That’s exactly what I used to say when I had to go visit my Grandma Dolly.”

Squee didn’t speak, just looked to Suzy as if he wanted more.

“It’s just for a little bit, Squee. Just until your dad’s back from Grandma Merle’s . . .” she trailed off. It was a prospect that didn’t make anyone feel any better at all.

THE LODGE WAS OVERLY QUIET. You might have suspected hubbub, but there was none. It was quiet as a funeral, small groups of people huddled in corners, processing the events. Everyone had a version to tell: how they’d heard, where they’d been, what they’d thought at first, how that had changed. Sheriff Harty and Deputy Davey Mitchell spoke to the employees a few at a time. As some of the last people to hear, if not see, Lorna Squire alive the previous night, Peg and Jeremy were questioned together, their responses taken and recorded with great enthusiasm on the part of the deputy who didn’t often get to do much but look stern and holler at kids he caught climbing the yacht club fence for late-night swims.